I open my daily Google news alert e-mail this morning and a pattern immediately emerged from the selection.

• WOOD TV8 Yoga for better sleep - informative five-minute video feature on a bedtime routine
• Huffington Post How Laughing Yoga Helped Me Take Relaxation Seriously about this twist. Also see Yogalaff.com
• Globe and Mail Night moves: Sleep yoga may be better than counting sheep- more info about yoga as "foreplay before bed to set the mood before sleep."
• SFGate Restorative yoga for those who want to relax
• Reuters Rwandans reach to yoga as a trauma therapy

I had made a decision to refrain from posting a lot of news items on yoga and meditation unless I could really add something to the content. These short entries were easy to fire off, but others sites, like YogaDorks, do this job well and with a lot more humor that I can muster about the yoga scene here in the States and around the world. I wanted to refocus my blog on my practice, photography, reading, and other assets that a reader would not find elsewhere.

And to contradict what I just said, let me close by pointing to this New York Times article, When Chocolate and Chakras Collide about the trend towards mixing yoga and food. Anything that appears in the NY Times is an indicator of what's happening culturally around yoga.